Towering over central Bucharest, the Palace of the Parliament, also known as the People’s House has gone down as one of the largest vanity projects ever undertaken.
Construction of the colossal building alone displaced 40,000 residents and destroyed an entire neighbourhood before its completion in 1997.
The palace now serves as a parliamentary administrative building and is a popular tourist attraction, with guided tours beginning at £14.60.
Built by dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who was executed alongside his wife during the 1989 Romanian Revolution, he never saw the palace completed. It is the world’s heaviest building, weighing approximately 4.10 million tonnes.
The palace is a massive structure, with 1,100 rooms and eight underground tunnels, as demanded by Ceaușescu for nuclear war preparations.
Heating, electricity, and lighting costs nearly £6million per year, which is equivalent to the total cost of powering a medium-sized city.
The anti-communist uprising, which ousted the Ceausescus from power, resulted in more than 1,000 fatalities and 3,300 injuries.
Romanians endured meagre food rations and lived in constant fear of the ruthless Securitate secret police, while party officials enjoyed a life of luxury.
The Ceausescus were clandestinely buried under crosses with fake names during the night, as the new regime authorities were concerned that the tombs might be vandalized by discontented citizens.
Ceaușescu children continue to question the location of the late dictator’s remains with the couple’s suspected remains being exhumed in 2010 for DNA testing.
